The woman had pounded on the door, begging to be let in. She’d cried out that she’d come to Scotland to warn Cecelia. That Lilly and the girls were in danger.
She’d sounded so frightened, so incredibly convincing, Cecelia had admitted her immediately.
And she and Jean-Yves had been ambushed.
“Genny.” Cecelia rushed to the door. “Genny let me out.”
“Hello there, honey.” The soft regret in Genny’s dark eyes conjured a little flame of hope in Cecelia’s middle. Perhaps Genny had been helpless in all this somehow, coerced by the Lord Chancellor to betray her. One couldn’t fault her for that.
“Genny? Please. Don’t keep me underground.” Cecelia fought sobs of hysteria threatening to overtake her. “Tell me everyone’s all right, that they’re alive.”
Ramsay would not have allowed her to be taken. Had he been overcome? Killed? Where was Phoebe? Jean-Yves?
She couldn’t imagine a world without them in it.
Genny tilted her head to the side, her ringlets flowing flaxen over her bare shoulder. “Honey, there are too many bodies to count now, all because of this.” She held up the codex. “I couldn’t tell you who survived and who didn’t.”
Cecelia leaned forward, pressing her forehead to the glass, fighting a dark anguish. “I know,” she sobbed. “Burn it. It’s brought nothing but pain.”
That pain welled within her. Deep and abiding. Was this how she ended? Was everyone she cared about hurt or … worse? Were they after Frank and Alexander next? She wanted to ask again, to insist, but was terrified of the answer. If she did not know, there was still hope.
And hope might be all she had left in the end.
“Step back, doll.” Keys rattled on the other side of the door as Genny unlocked her prison. “I’m coming in there with you.”
The kindle of hope flared to a bright glow, and Cecelia scurried out of the way.
The door opened. Winston and two other men preceded Genny into the room. Two of them carried crystal oil lanterns and set them on what used to be student desks before the explosion and subsequent chaos had decimated what Cecelia could now see had been a classroom.
Something else filtered into the room behind them. Something that extinguished any hope with astonishing immediacy.
The cries of children.
They echoed down the long hall, each of them breaking her heart. The calls and pleas of captive young girls locked beneath the earth as she was. Begging for mercy. To be released. To be fed.
This was her fault, Cecelia realized. Once she’d gone to Scotland, Henrietta’s had become the hellish prison Ramsay had initially suspected it was. The girls hadn’t been here when she’d taken custody of the property, but they’d been moved in when she’d fled.
There were no words for the horror of the din. For the memories they evoked in Cecelia. All the blood drained from her extremities and, had her stomach not been empty, she’d have heaved its contents onto the ashes at her feet.
“What have you done?” The demand escaped as a hoarse whisper of dismay. “What sort of nightmare has this place become? Did Henrietta know about this?”
Genny’s features arranged themselves into a smug, repulsive mask of disgust.
Cecelia stepped back, shocked at the first time the woman hadn’t appeared a stunning beauty.
“Henrietta Thistledown could dress this place in all the lace and silk she wanted, but at the end of the day the girls who worked in the casino were all still nothing but a line of pretty cunts. And she was the queen of us all.”
Cecelia flinched. “I’m sorry if she was cruel to you, Genny. But I never would have been. I would have made this place a haven, you have to believe me.”
“Oh honey, I believe you. I have nothin’ against you, personally,” Genny rushed to assure her. “You’re an absolute peach, I declare. I wish we could have truly been friends. Business partners, even.”
Perplexed, bemused, Cecelia glanced at the men fanned out to Genny’s right.
Winston, almost unrecognizable without his Georgian costume, was younger than Cecelia had first assumed.
Next to him stood a big, bald man with no neck to speak of and an extra layer of bulge around his muscles. To his right, a lovely-skinned Indian man with a long, bushy beard clasped his hands in front of him.
“Genny.” Cecelia felt a flare of a different sort as she read a sort of sinister anticipation in their eyes. “Genny what are they doing here? What is going on?”
“You should have married, Cecelia, after your tenure at de Chardonne.” Genny acted as if she’d never asked a question. “You should have nursed fat babies and settled down, then Henrietta wouldn’t have been so goddamned proud of you.”
Cecelia shook her head, wishing she understood. “What does my getting married have to do with anything?”
Genny’s expression darkened from unkind to truly demonic. “Do you realize I worked for that woman nearly twenty years?” she hissed. “She thought she was above us. That she could outsmart every person in this godforsaken empire, and I’ll be damned if she didn’t almost do it.” Genny crept closer, brandishing the codex. “I licked that woman’s boots for twenty. Fucking. Years. I was her servant, her handler, her confidante, and her lover. And you know what the scum-sucking bitch left me?”
Cecelia took a step back against the woman’s advance. She couldn’t help herself; she’d never in her life been regarded with such abject hatred. Not from the Vicar Teague. Not from her fellow male students at university.
Not even from Ramsay when he thought she was responsible for the worst crimes imaginable.
“Nothing.” Genny tossed the codex to Cecelia’s feet, where it landed with an innocuous whump. “That woman left me not one goddamned thing else but a love note with instructions to look after you and that little brat with a promise that you’d take care of me.” The last part of the sentence she forced between clenched teeth.
“Phoebe?” Cecelia rushed forward. “Tell me you haven’t hurt her.”
“You are so like that sanctimonious, undeserving cow!” Genny’s lips curled into a masculine sort of snarl. “No, no you’re worse. You never once had to lie beneath a rutting boar of a man to feed yourself. You never had to fight off drunk men and work on your feet for endless nights just to avoid working on your back.”
Her fingers turned to claws as she gestured her hatred. “You were educated, spoiled, coddled. I fucked half the ton while you went on holiday with them. And when Henrietta found me, I helped earn the money on the card tables. Money she sent to you. I built this empire with her, and she leaves it to you?” She shook her head in abject disbelief. “What makes you think you deserve this?”
“I—I don’t!” Cecelia insisted. “I never wanted—”
“I don’t give a silken shit what you wanted,” Genny said. “I only care what you can do for me now.”
“What? What would you have me do?”
Genny pointed to the book at her feet. The dratted codex. The bane of Cecelia’s existence. “I know you’ve deciphered it. I saw the pages burning in the fireplace before I fished them out. There’s a fortune worth of information in there, and I need every word, do you understand?”